Friday, April 10, 2009

"Paint The Sun Up In the Sky": More on Perfect Pop and Female Vocals

This clip of Sophie Ellis-Bextor covering an obscure 1970's classic (I don't think it charted in the States which would explain why my encyclopedic mind didn't register it) got me thinking about what I liked about pop music and, specifically, why I more and more preferred female vocalists over male vocalists.

I can't pin it down. If I could, I probably wouldn't have to blog about music ever again.

(Since the best Kenickie clips have been yanked off of YouTube, they will not make this countdown.)

Sophie Ellis-Bextor "Yes Sir, I Can Boogie"

Sophie's limited dancing skills, her pronunciation of the word "dance," and her look; Susanna Hoffs, looking ridiculously hot, as she sings "Some have a style that they work hard to refine..."; The way the song speeds up in "Secrets" and Tracy Tracy sings: "Paint the sun up in the sky" with renewed urgency; the vocals in Puffy's "Yume No Tame Ni" right before the guitar solo -- around minute 1:37; theres more drama and genuine emotion poured into a seemingly ironic bit of retro like "Judy" than in any po-faced Radiohead track; the silly, breathy, overwrought emotion in the Supremes song -- so over-the-top that it starts to have meaning again without any irony; and the song that turned me into a big fat puddle of jelly when I was a 9-year-old looking up at the TV: "Sam" by Olivia Newton-John; and Blondie, adding the sexy that Olivia was missing only a few years earlier.

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About Me

I write about stuff I like.
Born in Washington, D.C., in 1967, I spent most of my life in Maryland before I moved to Hong Kong at the very end of 2011. I worked in Kowloon, and lived on Lamma Island, for nearly 3 years, and then I moved back to Maryland with my wife at the end of August 2014. When I was younger, I worked in 3 record stores in College Park, Maryland, from 1987 to 1990 and those jobs gave me a lot of joy, as well as a musical education. I was once a huge fan of the cinema of Hong Kong, especially Shaw Brothers titles. An Anglophile, I still gravitate to British films and music. My youth was spent on Marvel comics, and Starlog and Famous Monsters magazines; Universal and Hammer horror movies; the work of Ray Harryhausen; classic American films of the 1930s; Hanna-Barbera cartoons; music from the glory days of American AM radio; lousy TV reruns; Mego toys; and Godzilla flicks...